Milton Friedman's Name Disappears From Foundation, But His School-Choice Beliefs Live On

Milton and Rose Friedman were honored by U.S. President George W. Bush at a White House ceremony in 2002. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Free-market economists Milton and Rose Friedman launched the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice back in 1996, they planned for the day when their name would come down off the marquee. On Friday their plan became reality when the Indianapolis-based foundation turned into EdChoice.

“Thank you, Milton and Rose, for giving us the powerful idea that parents should be in the educational driver’s seat,” said Robert Enlow, the foundation’s president and CEO, in a statement.

The Friedmans, Enlow said, “worried that their legacy foundation could potentially be pulled off course years down the road” when neither they nor any family members were still involved, as has happened to other family legacy foundations.

“Even though Milton and Rose had been referred to as ‘the modern architects of voucher’ and had been promoting educational choice since 1955, the Friedmans always wanted their foundation to focus not on them, but on educating the public about the benefits of educational choice,” Enlow added.

Milton, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics, died in 2006 and Rose died in 2010.

The foundation points out that when it opened in 1996, there were five educational choice programs in the country serving fewer than 10,000 students. Twenty years later, more than 400,000 students participate in 61 programs in 30 states and the District of Columbia. These include vouchers, the educational savings account (ESA) and tax-credit scholarships.

“But the choices are not equal, and they are certainly not big enough,” Enlow said. “It’s time to do more.”

The foundation’s 2015 “year in review” noted these developments:

• Indiana’s Choice Scholarship Program is the nation’s largest voucher program in terms of participation with 32,686 enrollees.

• Nevada has the broadest eligibility of any ESA program with 96% of all students in the state eligible.

• Florida has the largest ESA program in terms of participation with 4,080 students enrolled.

• Florida has the largest tax-credit scholarship program in terms of participation with 78,142 students enrolled.

Vermont and Maine introduced town tuitioning – the first school-choice programs - in the years after the Civil War but it wasn’t until the 21st century that more than a handful of states allowed choice in public education. Milton Friedman said the way to drag education out of the 19th century was “by introducing competition on a broad scale.”

The foundation says ESAs are the future of school choice because they allow parents to control deposits of public funds into government-authorized savings accounts that can be accessed to pay for tuition at private schools, online courses, tutoring, educational therapies and even higher-ed costs.

“We believe that government has a responsibility to educate the public, but that doesn’t mean writing every child a mandatory prescription for ‘public school’ as it’s been defined over the past 60 years,” Enlow said. “We trust families to know their kids better than bureaucrats do, and we trust that they will invest wisely in their educational futures.”

Of course, not everyone is a fan of the Friedmans and school choice. The National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union, says a problem with vouchers is that they were not designed as a program devoted solely to low-income children.

“Milton Friedman, the ‘grandfather’ of vouchers, dismissed the notion that vouchers could help low-income families, saying ‘it is essential that no conditions be attached to the acceptance of vouchers that interfere with the freedom of private enterprises to experiment,’ says the union.

Milton gets the last word.

I am combining my lives as a journalist, school board member and parent to cover education, primarily from kindergarten through high school. I worked for news organizations in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts, New Jersey and Florida before moving to South Africa and covering ...